George III and the Other ‘Mad King’

Abstract A memorable scene in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III/King George sees George III discovered in a dramatic reading from King Lear. Though the scene is pure invention, George III did read Lear during his illness of 1788–89, as recounted in a report from one of his physicians, Lucas Pepys, to the Prince of Wales. The king’s equerry Robert Greville meanwhile observed that Lear was ‘imprudently given to him’, a view taken even more strongly by the physician Richard Warren, who regarded it as just one of many errors disturbing the quiet most conducive to the king’s recovery made by Francis Willis, the provincial mad-doctor called in to assist (and resented by) the royal physicians. Willis protested his innocence, and it subsequently transpired that the Lear which the king had read was George Colman’s ‘corrected’ version in a volume with only Colman’s name on it, which he may have requested in a deliberate effort to put his doctors off the scent. The affair served to crystallize many of the tensions over the treatment of the royal malady. The mentally deranged king clearly wanted to read Lear, but was this because he equated his ‘madness’ with Lear’s, or rather because of other parallels in their situations?